the requirement for union dues, the R's cut social security and medicare and taxes, when we gut consumer protection and environmental protection, what will the new America look like?

My guesstimate, healthcare access in rural locales will get worse, doctors will be leaving and hospitals closing. Those states that like dirty air and water will get their wish and after guys like Inhofe are dead and gone they will be wrestling with the cost of cleaning up for generations, teachers will become very scarce and schools will have to rely on volunteers, infrastructure is going to start collapsing in the half of states without money. There will be fewer retired people because more than half the population won't be able to afford to retire. America will be great again just like in the 1930's. The divide between the haves and have nots will grow significantly larger and social unrest will build. If you are currently a millionaire, these next few years will be your salad days, play it right and your offspring could be set for life. If you aren't in the top 2-5%, well....kiss your middle clASS goodbye. Your access to the American dream is closing soon. But fret not because McDonalds will be hiring and you can work be in charge of cleaning out the fryers every night.

The only question now is if R's have the balls to take this full term like Brownback did and push it to the illogical limit? I hope they do. I hope they win the midterms and continue pushing trickle down into 2020, maybe best if they go until 2024. After they collapse "big government" and the rubes figure out what that means we will get a Newer New Deal with universal healthcare, stronger worker protections and unions and a strong social safety net. You know, societal stability structures like the rest of the civilized world has. Right now we are a on a drunken power binge and we need to hit rock bottom before we can get better.

Good night and good luck.

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Peace, bread, work, and freedom is the best we can achieveAnd wearing badges is not enough, in days like these

the requirement for union dues, the R's cut social security and medicare and taxes, when we gut consumer protection and environmental protection, what will the new America look like?

My guesstimate, healthcare access in rural locales will get worse, doctors will be leaving and hospitals closing. Those states that like dirty air and water will get their wish and after guys like Inhofe are dead and gone they will be wrestling with the cost of cleaning up for generations, teachers will become very scarce and schools will have to rely on volunteers, infrastructure is going to start collapsing in the half of states without money. There will be fewer retired people because more than half the population won't be able to afford to retire. America will be great again just like in the 1930's. The divide between the haves and have nots will grow significantly larger and social unrest will build. If you are currently a millionaire, these next few years will be your salad days, play it right and your offspring could be set for life. If you aren't in the top 2-5%, well....kiss your middle clASS goodbye. Your access to the American dream is closing soon. But fret not because McDonalds will be hiring and you can work be in charge of cleaning out the fryers every night.

The only question now is if R's have the balls to take this full term like Brownback did and push it to the illogical limit? I hope they do. I hope they win the midterms and continue pushing trickle down into 2020, maybe best if they go until 2024. After they collapse "big government" and the rubes figure out what that means we will get a Newer New Deal with universal healthcare, stronger worker protections and unions and a strong social safety net. You know, societal stability structures like the rest of the civilized world has. Right now we are a on a drunken power binge and we need to hit rock bottom before we can get better.

Well...in 2010, there was no CPB. The nasty Bushies were forcing everyone to drink water laced with cyanide for eight years (and OLASBA had not yet cleaned it up). There was no ACA. OLASBA's tax hikes had only just taken effect and hadn't replenished the coffers (giggle).

Yeah I do. The worst was back in the mid 60's. We were at my grandmother's home on the south side of Chicago. A couple of miles east of us we could see the smoke from the fires of burning buildings. My grandfather was an officer with the Chicago police and he was on the periphery of the mess trying to keep it from taking over the rest of the city. This was pre-cell phone, so to keep track of things we had to listen to the radio news reports and wait for my grandfather to get to a pay phone and call every couple of hours to give us an update on how close the riot was getting and what our escape route would be if he called an told us to bail. We had stuff in the car and were ready to bug out on short notice if we got the call or if we started hearing gunfire. Real social unrest is kind of like war, at least it was to a 7 year old who hd never seen [censored] go down before. I remember even the cops, who in Chicago always seemed to act like they had everything under control, sounding and looking spooked. I remember rolling out of the airport in Detroit in the mid 1980's and heading towards a construction site. A scab crew of iron workers from Ohio was working on a hotel. As I drove up the MI ironworkers were rolling the job trailers over and smashing the GC's trucks. I decided to detour and take a different route to my jobsite. The social safety net buys some stability. You can argue the "morality" and economic costs of it all, but instability is pretty damn expensive as well and people get hurt. The middle class is shrinking, the void between there haves and have nots is growing. As access to healthcare gets harder and worker protections get eroded things will start to get angry. The occupy movement was pretty docile compared to the "old days". There was some hope that things would change for the better back then. The language currently out of Washington is more divisive ( no don't tell me that a black man looking out for black people was divisive, that's only if you were a white supremacist that it is divisive ) than back then and the safety net will be getting cut if they go through with what they are proposing. Add in a trade war and who knows what kind of chaos we could unleash. Maybe I remember the old days different than you, maybe you missed some of those days.

The middle class is shrinking, the void between there haves and have nots is growing.

Indeed it is. But A) it's a global problem, not one preconditioned on American policy (or lack thereof); and B) that which is related to American policy is due in large part to the corporatist nature of our government/economic model. Big government is a nifty foil to Big business, but only in theory. In practice, they function in a collusive relationship.

As access to healthcare gets harder and worker protections get eroded things will start to get angry.

Why, pray tell, is access to healthcare shrinking? Didn't we fix that? Weird how the results have been precisely what some of us predicted, and yet the only options offered are to double down on failure.The occupy movement was pretty docile compared to the "old days".

Astroturf always is.

There was some hope that things would change for the better back then.

And they did.The language currently out of Washington is more divisive ( no don't tell me that a black man looking out for black people was divisive, that's only if you were a white supremacist that it is divisive ) than back then and the safety net will be getting cut if they go through with what they are proposing.

Yes, it's divisive. Just as it has been since January 20, 1981.

As for the safety net, who is proposing to do anything about it? Please, I'd love to support them. NO ONE cares about entitlements, despite the fact that they are freight train speeding right at all of us. As of 2012, combined unfunded liabilities for federal, state, and private pension and health care plans was pushing upward of $100 TRILLION. Short of simply printing the money to pay those liabilities, there is no alternative but to restructure them.

I don't remember all of those bad old days, but then, I was just poking a little fun at the fact that most of the government solutions that you mentioned are malfunctioning policies less than a decade old.

There you go using the "C" word, Trump said there is none so just stop. You sound like a Democratic shill. Yes big government and big corps do work together to the detriment of the middle class. R's more the D's but I'm sure you will dispute that.

So the middle class is dying and there isn't anything we can do about it so let's give the top earners a big tax cut and get on with letting the economic divide increase? OK, but maybe we give the middle class tax cuts instead and put more money into education. The path to the middle class is through education. More STEM education and get people trained for the jobs that we are losing our edge in. It used to be when I got resumes from KU School of Engineering it was 70/30 with US born students having the edge. This spring those numbers were reversed. College is expensive and we should figure out how to use our resources to make it more affordable. My big tax cut for next year will do nothing to help that. Yes I think these are the sorts of things government is better suited for than money in shareholders pockets.

Access to healthcare shrinking.....two words, individual mandate. Yes when it kicks in in 2019 (conveniently after mid terms) there will be people opting out and the cost of health insurance will start to rise more rapidly, risk pool shrinking. Let;'s check in, in about year or so from now and we will see who is saying I told you so. I just put it on my phone calendar to remind in a year. My employees who are on a group policy will suffer the least but individuals will start seeing the uptick in a bigger way.

No one is talking about cutting back on the safety net? Someone please tell Paul Ryan. If you don't have pensions for Federal and State jobs you will have to start using even less qualified employees. No engineer works for the DOT unless they want the pension benefits. Is it too much? maybe.

And unions will be needed now more than in the past to represent the worker. Have their been abuses, sure but mostly this is a way to cut funding to Democratic candidates. The big stockholders will be able to funnel money to R's but D's will get less union money. I think unions will make a resurgence in the next decade.

I don't think you were alive during the bad old days. The black and white video doesn't do it justice, it was in technicolor in real life. Yes the malfunctioning policies are more recent but the anger is palpable just like it was back then. Another economic downturn fueled by "let them eat cake" economic politics may be all it takes to blow the lid off. We will see.

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Peace, bread, work, and freedom is the best we can achieveAnd wearing badges is not enough, in days like these